Face to Face with Tremain

Leaving work late at night, its dark out and there’s nobody around. The train home is almost empty.

I get on board and fall into a seat. I had to pick this seat, Because across the aisle from me is Tremain.

Well, not really. I’m not sitting across the aisle from a person I made up. I’m sitting across the aisle from someone I saw on the train a year or so ago and meticulously detailed in my notebook, realizing that he was who I was looking for as a template for this character I’ve invented.

Alan Tremain is a weary detective in a story I made up that needed a POV character to anchor the action, give it context. I’d gone back and forth on who he is, and in early drafts, his personality bounces between far-too-affable to far-too-weary. I needed a face; someone for him to “be” while I figured out who he was.

And then I saw him.

I don’t know this person’s actual name. I don’t know anything about him, except for how he looks.

Tall, thin, with a pinker-than-normal cast to his skin. Short cropped gray hair, white-blue eyes and a small white goatee around his mouth, trimmed precisely and grown out to about a quarter inch. Wearing a black coat, waist length and built for action. No ring on his left hand but there’s a slight depression around his ring finger, a mute testament that there used to be one there. A faint, sardonic smile on his face. Unlike everyone else on the train he’s not looking at his phone, he’s looking out the window; one long leg bent with his foot resting on the radiator that runs along the inner wall of the train, under the seats.

But that was a year ago. My actual notes were hand-written, scribbled into a Field Notes memo book that now lives under my bed. I have a high-security system for my hand-written notes: my handwriting is terrible. Once I got out of eyeshot, I wrote up the note you see above.

And over the intervening year, this unknown fellow passenger has turned to Tremain. My detective. I’ve been thinking about this face and how he interacts with a bunch of other people I’ve invented. He doesn’t know that, of course, and, intellectually, I know he doesn’t know. But I want to grill him, ask him questions about parts of the plot that are getting away from me because he’s seen them, he’s lived them. Except of course he hasn’t. I want to ask him questions about who he is as a real person, what he likes, what he eats for dinner, how the divorce went, who got the kids if there were kids. Except I’m pretty sure that the answer to “what do you dislike” would be “strangers who ask surprisingly intimate questions on public transportation.”

So I say nothing, sitting across from someone who is incredibly important to me, someone I’ve never met.